Here's my particle setup.
http://www.tobyatwork.de/3d-worxx/experiments/particles/lava_fountain/maxscript_cores.gif
Any suggestions by the heroes of particles on how I can optimize the flow and rendering times? Would you add motion blur in post or render it within each frame?

entrancea

11-16-2007, 09:08 AM

If I am correct then you got this from a 3D World tutorial.And if I can place my mind then it was done with spheres.I would have used Krakatoa to get a similar yet much better effect and the rendering times would go way down.Just specify the 3 different colours to the particles and use additive density in krakatoa and then add the glow and all in After Effect.

Or if you wanna stick with your current settings the render them in different passes.And use small number of particles and do 2 or 3 different renders of the same layer.Say for example you have your lava.And you want 100,000 particles for the lava.Then what you could do is render 30,000 particles once,30,000 more in another pass by using uniquness in which ever parameter you want to to give this second render some randomness and so on and so on....

But overall personally I think Krakatoa will do the trick.

Cheers,
Entrancea

pixel9

11-16-2007, 11:09 AM

Never heard of "3D World" since I just asked a friend of mine, whether he would know it or not. Now, I know of what you're talking about.

Well, the workflow you mentioned requires more work in post than my way, but reduces rendertimes incredibly. I'll give it a shot.

I still feature some problems with the particles hitting the ground. Some bounce up very fast and some just hit the ground and keep resting there.

entrancea

11-23-2007, 02:53 AM

Hey Gawang,
Nice work to start with.But now the issues which you have!Keep your ground deflector to have a low deflecting value and in the PFlow chart in your Collision with ground test,change the parameter to stop deflecting after 5 bounces(which would make your particles after a few collisions with the ground....this adds a little life to the whole scene)....and also if there is a gravity Force with you colllision you can have a low seeting for the gravity so that the particles stay in air a little longer after each bounce thus synchronising with your slow-mo effect.And as for the particles which shoot up towards the sky,I was wondering who are they deflecting with...who ever it is check its deflection amount and set it to a low value....one more thing that might cause this is if you have used speed by surface....If you have then check that too and play around with the parameters.....If you want you can post your scene file here and I'll have a look at it...

Cheers,
Entrancea

pixel9

11-23-2007, 12:02 PM

Many thanks for your effort.

I did some further experiments on the scene, but maybe you can add some improvements to the flow, I'm currently not able to fix.

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